Greg Sargent has a disquieting aspect of a new CNN poll showing "anti-incumbent fever at record high." Greg:
But more interesting is the fact that if you look at the internals, it turns out that one of those incumbents being targeted by "anti-incumbent fever" may also include the President:
Do you think Barack Obama deserves to be reelected, or not?
Yes, deserves to be reelected 44%
No, does not deserve to be reelected 52%
To be clear, this obviously doesn’t have any real bearing on his reelection chances, since 2012 is very far away. But this finding shows just how deep anti-incumbent fervor is running — after all, despite the high marks Obama gets for personal and leadership attributes, a majority says he doesn’t deserve a second term, at least right now.
There's an antidote to this, zeroed in on by Matt Yglesias:
In my view, one of the big problems we have in American government is that politicians vastly overrate the importance of "positioning" and basically meaningless gambits. What the truth about the close linkages between economic performance and political outcomes reveal is that smart politicians should try harder to govern effectively by enacting policies that lead to broadly shared prosperity. The belief that you can just kind of much around for years and then turn things around with a clever speech or single well-honed micro-initiative is what leads to a pernicious level of passivity.
In other words, providing good government is good politics. Yes, that's hard to do with an obstructionist opposition party. But voters aren't in the mood to hear excuses. Dems still have the White House and large Congressional majorities. If they want to keep them, they need to use them.